PEORIA — Children’s Hospital of Illinois features in “A Leap of Faith,” Meredith Vieira’s NBC special Friday on the ground-breaking but controversial work of the surgeon who performed the country’s first bio-engineered transplant on a child in Peoria last year.

Vieira and her crew followed Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, an international expert on regenerative medicine, as he and a team of local doctors prepared for and performed the complex, experimental surgery on 2-year-old Hannah Warren, a Korean girl born without a windpipe.

The surgery used Hannah’s stem cells to generate her own transplant organ, a procedure that could potentially eliminate the need for organ donations.

The hospital received inquiries from people with thoracic problems from around the world after media stories about Hannah’s pioneering transplant, said Dr. Mark Holterman, a pediatric surgeon at Children’s Hospital, based at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center.

St. Francis and other institutions, including academic research centers, are exploring ways to expand Macchiarini’s work in the United States. “Bringing these services to Illinois will require solid infrastructure and financial and community support,” Holterman said by email.

NBC producers “spent quite a bit of time with us,” said Shelli Dankoff, spokeswoman for OSF St. Francis Medical Center, where Children’s Hospital is based.

Vieira interviewed Holterman, whose chance meeting with Hannah’s parents in Seoul led to the complicated 11-hour surgery being performed in Peoria. She also interviewed Dr. Rick Pearl, chief surgeon of Children’s Hospital.

The crew filmed the surgery and the bio-engineering process used to grow the trachea transplant organ.

The two-hour special highlights the stories of three patients: a single dad in Baltimore, a former Russian dancer and Hannah, who died in July 2013, a month before her third birthday. Cause of death was not the transplant, but complications from the surgery, St. Francis officials said at the time. The surgery occurred in April 2013.

Unable to eat, drink, or swallow on her own, Hannah spent much of her life in the neo-natal intensive care unit of a Korean hospital. She breathed through a tube inserted into her esophagus. After the surgery, she was able to eat for the first time.